Medici of the Meadowlands

By Mark Levine

Published: August 3, 2003

The tangled relationship of art, illusion and the marketplace being what it is -- an ongoing melodrama, set to the strains of keening violins -- it so happened that 250 tuxedoed, gowned and bejeweled members of the patronage class showed up for an Italianate palace ball one night this spring at a defunct train station in a Jersey City marsh. Guests were met at the gate by a young man in a pleated skirt, pointy black slippers and a frilly blouse under a gold brocaded vest, who bowed theatrically and said, ''Buona notte, signori e signore.'' The title of the ball was Palazzo di Cremona, and the domed terminal of the Central Railroad of New Jersey was done up for the evening with garlands of citrus leaves and blood oranges. Three former governors of New Jersey were present, along with Paolo Bodini, mayor of Cremona, Italy, a 2,300-year-old town north of Milan. Cremona occupies a status among violin aficionados akin to that of Detroit among car buffs, having been the ground on which such violin-making luminaries as Niccolò Amati, Giuseppe Guarneri and, above all, Antonio Stradivari thrived. Mayor Bodini was a guest of the evening's honorees, an elderly couple named Evelyn and Herbert Axelrod, who had gained vast wealth by addressing themselves to the needs of caretakers of guppies, goldfish, parakeets, lizards, gerbils and the like, and who elicited, throughout the evening, comparison to the beneficent Medicis of Florence.

For a price, the Axelrods had lavished on the Newark-based New Jersey Symphony Orchestra a collection of 30 stringed instruments from the 17th and 18th centuries. They claimed to have spurned an offer of $55 million for these same strings from the esteemed Vienna Philharmonic and were said, further, to have rejected entreaties from the New York Philharmonic, the orchestral Goliath in whose shadow the Jersey players languish. Instead, the Axelrods opted to accept an almost symbolic offering of $18 million from New Jersey -- a cut-rate price that nonetheless exceeds the orchestra's entire annual budget.

The dinner guests repaired to the train station's south baggage room for a $2,500-a-head inaugural hearing of the new strings. The musicians paraded down the center aisle of the room like members of a wedding party. Zdenek Macal, the 67-year-old Czech-born conductor who has been the orchestra's music director for the past 10 years, mounted the stage, brought down his baton and directed his players to dig into a dance from Respighi's ''Ancient Airs and Dances.'' Bows were drawn across strings. Chords bounced around the walls. It sounded good. The concert continued with three movements of Mozart and wrapped up with a selection from Tchaikovsky's ''Serenade for Strings.'' The players sawed away at their instruments with vigor. The baggage room was awash in rich sonority. Only a moment or two of screechiness intruded. The audience rose to its feet, cheering, before the music ended. The event grossed $700,000.

What did Herbert Axelrod think? ''Awesome,'' he said. ''You could see the players were turned on. They were all really vibrating.''

The object in question -- the Stradivarius violin, of which some 600 remain on earth -- is, fundamentally, a splendidly carved wooden box. Its proportions are reminiscent of some long-lost ideal of the feminine torso: narrow, gently sloping shoulders, pinched waist and flaring hips. The top of the box is usually Norway spruce; the bottom, Bosnian maple. Some ascribe the object's magical sonic attributes to its varnish, the chemical constituents of which remain indeterminate. Although its design has been imitated for 300 years -- there is, at present, a bustling Chinese trade in making cheap instruments that are faithful to the original -- authentic Stradivarius specimens rarely sell for less than a half-million dollars and occasionally fetch as much as $6 million.

''The name Strad is so emotive today,'' remarks Gary Sturm, a curator of musical instruments at the Smithsonian Institution. Stradivari, Sturm explains, was well positioned to achieve marketplace dominance: he was wildly prolific and lived to the age of 93, about twice as long as most of his contemporaries; and he was born, around 1644, shortly after an outbreak of plague had thinned the ranks of competing violin makers. Niccolò Amati, Stradivari's mentor, may have standardized the shape and proportions of the instrument, but over time, Stradivari modified Amati's design in a way that preserved the instrument's sweet sound while providing greater projection. Stradivari's fame, considerable during his lifetime, was further boosted posthumously by the promotional efforts of the great 19th-century virtuoso Niccolò Paganini and later by the market-cornering tactics of instrument dealers like the London firm William E. Hill. ''There was a great deal of hype involved,'' says Norman Pickering, one of the world's leading experts on the acoustics of the violin. ''There's no great difference between the quality of Stradivarius violins and those of many of his contemporaries, not to mention those of violin makers before and since. But it's as if no other violin maker ever existed.''